The 11 Best Restaurants in Portland

Award-winning restaurants, standout chefs, and inventive dishes makes this Oregon city a foodie destination in its own right.

By
Sarah Z. Wexler

May 24, 2017

Cheryl Juetten

Portland, Oregon used to be known as Seattle's kid sister—but in the food world, this small city, with no sales tax on food or alcohol and access to nearby farms, definitely holds its own with the nation's best.

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1Chesa

Carly Diaz

Opened last year by Spanish chef Chef José Chesa, who was a 2016 and 2017 James Beard nominee, Chesa highlights flavorful paella, homemade sangrias, and a carving station with a vast selection of carefully curated Spanish hams, including Iberico. Save room for dessert to stop by his tiny adjoining churro shop, 180.

Yes, there is an hour-long wait on weekends at this adorable breakfast-lunch shop—but it's worth it (and you can drink their coffee while you wait). Then you're ready for their simple-but-perfectly-done breakfast egg plates with homemade bread, a monster breakfast burrito, or delicate pastries, all served on adorable dishes; the salted honey pie is especially good.

Six-time James Beard-nominated chef Cathy Whims uses mozzarella made daily in-house and an 800-degree wood-burning oven from Tuscany, burning local apple or cherry wood; chefs also throw herb stalks into the fire throughout the night for extra flavor, and the pizza is served with dense metal scissors for DIY slice-cutting.

Buzzing from its Best New Restaurant and Restaurant of the Year awards in 2016, this neighborhood spot right next to a park on an inactive volcano (!) is known for chef Katy Millard's thoughtful, seasonal dinners (breakfast and lunch are slightly less noteworthy). Come for her whole guinea hen or roasted carrots with cocoa nibs, but stay for her unique desserts: absinthe cake or a black sesame Pavlova.

Chef Althea Potter's pastas and charcuterie plates are as good as at the city's best Italian restaurants, plus you can wash them down with special rotating wine flights. Try the smoked carrots with harissa or green garlic risotto. Dozens of local winemakers collaborate at this space, which also stocks an impressive international wine list, including lesser-knowns varietals such as Gamay Noir, Mourvedre, Chenin Blanc, Muscat, and Arneis.

Make a reservation weeks in advance, or luck out and snag a spot at the bar at rustic Italian Ava Gene's, which has won every Best New Restaurant award there is—and has proved for three years running it deserves the hype. Chef Joshua McFadden, who cooked for Momofuku and Blue Hill, once worked on a farm and believes in "aggressively seasonal" cooking. He's especially talented with Giardini, the menu section that's all small plates of vegetables; he's just come out with a cookbook on it, Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables.

Already named a 2017 Restaurant of the Year by Food & Wine, Tusk is a new vegetable-driven, Middle Eastern-inspired spot from Ava Gene's Joshua McFadden and Executive Chef Sam Smith. The interior looks more L.A. than Portland: bright and sunny, with a pink neon sign. All vegetables and most grains are sourced directly from local farms, and the flatbreads are baked in-house. But the real stars are the ever-changing, slightly-wacky, seasonal salads, with ingredients like puffed rice, that spawned an entire hashtag (#saladdaze).

At this high-low French restaurant that isn't at all stuffy, two-time James Beard Award winner chef Gabriel Rucker mixes classics like Beef Cheek Bourguignon with not-so-classics like Wasabi Fried Chicken. Recently, the restaurant increased their prices but started a no-tipping policy to ensure benefits for all of their workers.

Chef Justin Woodward, who was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef award in 2013 and Best Chef Northwest award in 2015 and 2016, spotlights foraged ingredients at Castagna. Go all out for the 12-course tasting menu with such dishes as Dungeness crab and yellow-foot Oregon chanterelles with an infusion of hops. As with Le Pigeon, they recently enacted a 20% service charge to make sure employees are compensated fairly in both front and back of house.

Portland restauranteur John Gorham's original restaurant in town uses local ingredients to create Spanish-inspired tapas. He makes potatoes something special; his award-winning paella is tossed with chicken, chorizo, clams, shrimp, and mussels. Or, to taste the non-Spanish versions of his tapas, his other small-plate restaurants (Tasty n Alder, Tasty n Sons, MEC) are just as memorable.

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